Helianthus
by Charis M
Summary: “The only heartbeats she hears now are from the people around her, and she hates it.  She is a hunter of monsters, not a monster herself.”  Eventually the battle will be done, and when that happens, she seeks the only solace she can think of.


**Helianthus**  
by Charis

_Disclaimer: None of this is mine. Based off the anime rather than the manga._

_Notes: Because as much as I _like___ the idea of Integra and Alucard as a timeless vampiric couple, I can't really see it ever working while being true to character (though please, if you know of stories to prove me wrong, provide links!). Because Integra would be a frightfully scary vampire, but I don't think she would especially want to stay one if she could avoid it -- not past the point of fulfilling her duty. Started with the mental image of vampire Integra watching the sun rise. I leave it to you to decide whether Alucard's resistance to sunlight (as explained in the manga) is transferred, in any part, to those he turns. Title is the genus for sunflower. I am the World's Worst Title Inventor.  
Some weird tense changes, I think, but they're mostly deliberate._

She is beginning to forget things, and it bothers her far more than she lets on. What it felt like to eat. The sight of the sun. Being short of breath after protracted exertion, spots of blackness dancing before her eyes and her lungs heaving and her heart thudding in her own ears. The only heartbeats she hears now are from the people around her, and she hates it, hates it all the more for the fact that a part of her wants to _feed._ She is a hunter of monsters, not a monster herself.

_Was_.

He did not give her the choice, in the end. When she lay on the brink of death after a singularly severe altercation, he pushed her over and then brought her back. She still remembers, with a crystal clarity, the twinned horrors of coming to with her lips locked on his bleeding wrist and the realisation slamming into her of what she had become.

It did not change her mission, only the modus operandi. He knew better than to try to change that, and -- amazingly -- did not argue. Perhaps he felt there was no need; very soon the task will be completed satisfactorily, and thenhe could set about whatever _he_ wanted of her for eternity. Never mind that she was not going to oblige him.

For now, she concentrates on her duty. He calls her a Fury in battle, a whirlwind of death and destruction, ice and steel put into motion by the blood not her own that races hot through her useless veins. She doesn't listen. All that matters now is the hunt and the kill, finishing this before she forgets that she is supposed to hate what she has become.

And then it seems she awakens one evening and it is over: victory is achieved, England is safe, and Hellsing is officially no more. There is praise from the Queen, but they both know, she and the older woman she has admired for so long, that this is the end of an era. She does not say farewell, but it is understood.

She does not go to sleep the next morning. Alucard watches her curiously when she opens the door in the scant hours before dawn, but he does not try to stop her as she walks outside. The estate has fallen to disarray in recent years; she finds the top of a crumbling stone wall, overgrown with ivy, and settles atop it, gazing east. At some point, Alucard joins her, but he says nothing until the sky begins to lighten.

"Come inside, Integra."

"No."

A single syllable of rebellion. There are no longer bonds of master and servant between them in either configuration, but it is defiance all the same.

After a time, when the grey and inky blue begin to lighten, pinks and golds touching the clouds, "The sun will rise soon."

"I know."

She does not care. She wants it -- to see one last sunrise. She has forgotten what they look like, growing more accustomed to the cold moon's ascent.

Silence enwraps them once more. She lifts her chin and watches pink give way to gold, watches deep blue pale. It will hurt, she suspects, but she has accepted that -- just as she has accepted that this is not surrender, but a final act of will, of doing what she knows is right. He has no bindings on him anymore; she cannot kill him, and his Police Girl is harmless, more human than she herself ever really was. The journey to that undiscovered country will be her own.

"Integra --"

Light touches the horizon.


End file.
